CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NOVELISTS




CHAPTER I

OLD STYLE


1. LOCAL COLOR

A study of the American novel of the twentieth century must first of all
take stock of certain types of fiction which continue to persist, with
varying degrees of vitality and significance, from the last quarter of
the century preceding.

There is, to begin with, the type associated with the now moribund cult
of local color, which originally had Bret Harte for its prophet, and
which, beginning almost at once after the Civil War, gradually broadened
out until it saw priests in every state and followers in every county.
Obedient to the example of the prophet, most of the practitioners of the
mode chose to be episodic rather than epic in their undertakings; the
history of local color belongs primarily to the historian of the short
story. Even when the local colorists essayed the novel they commonly did
little more than to expand some episode into elaborate dimensions or to
string beads of episode upon an obvious thread. Hardly one of them ever
made any real advance, either in art or reputation, upon his earliest
important volume: George Washington Cable, after more than forty years,